Education results spur call for teachers to have more degrees

All teachers should be required to have two degrees to help tackle declining student performance as revealed by new international tests, a leading education professor said.

University of Melbourne education dean
Field Rickards
said teachers should need a two-year master’s qualification on top of a bachelor degree, so there were higher-skilled graduates entering the classroom and therefore, he said, improvements in student performance.

“There needs to be a game-changer," Professor Rickards said.

“It’s about lifting the status of the [teaching] profession [and] the ­capabilities of the professionals working in it."

Professor Rickards made the comments as the federal Coalition government seized on poor test results to steer debate away from its changes on school funding and towards teacher quality and principal autonomy.

Released overnight on Tuesday, the latest results from international testing for the Program for International Student Assessment showed a fall in achievement among 15-year-old Australians in science, maths and reading.

“Unless we really have teachers who can meet the needs of individual learners, it will be very difficult through other means to reverse this trend," Professor Rickards said.

Melbourne University only offers a masters degree in teaching, not an undergraduate one like many other universities. As a result, the average age of students in the masters is 27.

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The PISA results spurred politicians to criticise each other over previous governments’ track records.

The federal Labor opposition tried to increase pressure on the government not to re-adopt the former Howard government’s socio-economic model for allocating school funding and to fully implement of the Labor’s Gonski funding program.

But Education Minister
Christopher Pyne
accused the former Labor government of spending $20 billion on school halls and laptops while presiding over declining standards.

“The [OECD’s PISA report] found that it is the teacher you are allocated within a school that has a more important affect on the outcome of your results than which school you’ve been allocated to," Mr Pyne said, telling journalists in Canberra he wanted to focus on improving teacher training in universities, encouraging principal autonomy and engaging parents. These were more important than how much money was spent, he insisted.

School education analyst with the Grattan Institute, Ben Jensen, said spending needed to be better ­targeted. “We’ve generally spent the money on a variety of policies and programs that have been ineffective," he said, adding that the best teachers should be paid more.